10 ms·

I don't know how to phrase this nicely, but this is precisely the type of Hacker News nerd-blindness that I find amazing. It's "easier"? Is it? For young childr

I don't know how to phrase this nicely, but this is precisely the type of Hacker News nerd-blindness that I find amazing. It's "easier"? Is it? For young children who want to watch their kids shows and don't know what 4k means? For grandparents who want to see some k-dramas and have no clue about DRM or geo-locked? Sure, Netflix has issues and it's made some bad decisions, but let's not delude ourselves here. The group of people who are comfortable pirating media and find it "easier" than Netflix is at least an order of magnitude smaller than Netflix's user base. I'm sorry, I just find it really absurd when people claim something is easier when it's just not. Perhaps you find it to be a better trade off, but it is not easier.

Xelbair 5y ago
yes it is. I come from country where intellectual property was treated as a western joke. Children younger than 10 learned how to pirate - by themselves, without knowing even English. A lot of people still can do that, and it's quite easy to find out how.
fortran77 5y ago
Exactly. I’m a 59 year old man who knows how to pirate, but watches his content from streaming providers because it’s simpler and safer, and I don’t like to steal. I don’t think piracy is what’s killing them. It’s that there are too many streaming providers and people don’t hesitate to drop subscriptions. I tend to subscribe when there’s a deal, watch everything I want to see, then drop it and switch to another one for 6 months. And I’ll bet I’m not alone.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  This. I'm a 60-year-old (Do I win a kewpie doll?), and have the tech chops to pirate, but I don't want to. It's important for me to live a life of Personal Integrity. That stance gets a lot of chuckles with this crowd, but it's of critical importance, in my life. I'm fortunate, in being able to afford streaming services, but find the profusion and variety to be a mess. I like AppleTV Channels, and the way that the AppleTV Watch Now app aggregates the apps. Amazon has something similar, that my wife uses. Unfortunately, it looks like these knuckleheads can't agree on common licensing models. I don't want the "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." approach of cable bundlers, but I also don't like the myriad ways of subscribing, or, quite frankly, the ever-changing prices. They need to get their shit together.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I even have Plex set up with (mostly) ripped DVD content but I still subscribe to a few streaming services and buy/rent a la carte now and then. The fragmentation is annoying but subscribing/unsubscribing is pretty low friction. Though I wouldn't be surprised to see more discounting for longer subscription terms. Of course, what was (past tense) also annoying was paying $100/month for a cable bundle that I rarely watched. It's also the case that I have access to a ton of video and don't consider much to be "must see." And to the topic at hand, I may very well cancel Netflix one of these days. There's some stuff I haven't watched yet but after I get through that I may well drop it.
breakfastduck 5y ago
Using a pirate streaming service such as stremio is literally no more difficult than netflix. I think you underestimate how many people pirated things before netflix existed.
- yoz-y 5y ago
  When it was still called popcorn time I used it. It was easy to use, but it was far from being as reliable as any other commercial streaming service. Buffering was very common and subtitles were missing or would de-sync a lot.
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
    people forgive a lot of hiccups and quality issues when the service is "free". I see the same sentiment in the emulation scene where people will in one breath call a game "playable" despite weird graphical hitches, slowdowns, and crashes. And in the next breath berate some remaster because it dips under 60 FPS in a few moments of gameplay.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Wow, there's a "stremio" button on my TV's remote control? I can't find it. I have a feeling that the definitions of "difficult" and "literally" are unknown to you.
  - breakfastduck 5y ago
    I think we have a very different concept of 'difficult'. You seem to treat people as if their baseline is very, very low.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    Yes - people don't get that most folks want to watch on the TV without involving any browser.
- jasonlotito 5y ago
  > Using a pirate streaming service such as stremio is literally no more difficult than Netflix. Nope. Just tried it. Literally not. It gives me the option to play movies, but nope. Can only play trailers. There are addons, but they seem to use Torrent. I have no interest in streaming up to other people and redistributing the data. Is that set up automatically, or does it reuse my internet connection without informing me? Also, with Netflix, I don't have to worry about copyright issues. Does streamio make that as easy? None of this sounds literally as easy. And again, literally cannot play a movie I can easily play on Netflix.
lijogdfljk 5y ago
I think it's true in the same way that Media companies feigned that everyone was pirating. If it's just as fringe as you say, and i agree, then we shouldn't entertain the idea that media is (or was, in early 2000s before Netflix) losing that much money to pirating. As i'm sure now that people start migrating to less legal avenues for digital media we'll start seeing a resurgence of cries over lost profits due to piracy.
sgarland 5y ago
Agreed. While the *arrs are "easy" to set up once you have good knowledge of Kubernetes or at least Docker Compose, that's not exactly common. If you're using the native Windows clients, there's a pretty good chance you don't have a NAS set up (or at least not well), which means there's a decent chance you'll eventually have a hardware failure, and then be surprised when your media is suddenly gone. ZFS pools with full backups, redundant hardware, and highly available servers is not normal.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  You can run a media service for example jellyfin on the same PC as the client. Installers are a thing on windows, on Ubuntu you can install software with apt. It wasn't packaged for my distro so I downloaded an archive unzipped and dropped it in /opt Not sure why anyone would absolutely need to understand Kuberetes or even docker. Plugging a PC up to a display has been a better TV for a while now.
- brewdad 5y ago
  Even just having a spare PC to run your media server is not normal. Never mind all of the technical knowledge needed to keep it all running smoothly.
rhino369 5y ago
It's not easier. I've got a BS in EE and am old enough to have downloaded episodes of the TV show 24 over 56k using early BitTorrent. I've successfully set up plex (which requires an in house server/spare pc), sonarr, radarr, usenet, etc. I'm probably the 99% percentile in ability to pirate. And its not easier than netflix. 90% of people I know probably couldn't set this up. And the other 10% would spend more time dicking around with the set up than they would using netflix or the other services. GabeN is not correct. Piracy is a money problem. Free is very enticing.
- bin_bash 5y ago
  I didn't understand the GabeN reference but looked it up: > "Piracy is a service problem." Valve's Gabe Newell said that years ago, touting the success of Steam, his online video game distribution service.
  - the_other 5y ago
    Am I the only person that hates Steam? The UX is crap; the info architecture is obscure; it doesn't work well on macOS (or at all if I use the wrong file system); it uses confusing labels for the stash of stuff I've already bought. I don't use it often enough to know if my usr/pwd is still valid (it is, fortunately). It had some slightly odd 2FA type thing the last time I logged in. It just gives me the impression that it wants to hide games from me that I've already bought and to make new ones hard to find. I'd rather have discs in boxes taking up space (tbf I also collect vinyl so maybe I'm just anachronistic?) The only good thing going for it is that it doesn't ever email me junk.
    - robonerd 5y ago
      You aren't the only one. Steam is DRM with good PR. Much of the goodwill gamers have for Steam is based on misconceptions, rumors, or delusions, particularly: "If Valve ever goes out of business, they said they'll lift all the DRM for the games I've bought" I've heard that from so many gamers it isn't even funny, it's a widespread misconception and it's obvious horse shit. Maybe Valve has or once had that intention with their own in-house games, but they wouldn't even have the legal right to do something like that for 99.99% of the Steam catalogue. Even for the in-house games, you have to be naive to trust any sort of promise from a commercial software product that isn't in a contract. Notch supposedly once promised that Minecraft would eventually become open source; well that plan evaporated when Microsoft waved a few billion dollars in front of him. Maybe he meant it at the time he said it, but that doesn't count for anything.
dinobones 5y ago
It is extremely tired as well. Any time there is a post about Netflix, or some streaming service, I always predict there will be someone in the comments section talking about their “sweet, open source Unix based media server” and how much better it is.
- Krasnol 5y ago
  It would make it quite suspicious and weird if the most obvious solution to the problems which are often the content of those posts, wouldn't have been posted by somebody in the comments.
noelsusman 5y ago
It's amazing isn't it? Like people really think streaming services should care about mpv filters as a real use case for their customers. Incredible stuff.
tomc1985 5y ago
The thing that all these everyman-boosters that have invaded and gentrified tech seem to forget is that people are capable of learning, and with the right motivation, they will. Can piracy be the bridge to tech literacy? Sure.
- ohyoutravel 5y ago
  The comment was: “It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.” Which seems false on its face. Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up. This is unrelated to whether people are capable of learning, but I am even bearish on that when it comes to the average person in the current piracy environment.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    Sucks for them, I guess. Because with the right know-how and some setup it is pretty damn easy.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    > Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up You mean those same TVs and devices that plaster your screen with ads, arbitrarily modify the UI, suddenly make certain shows unavailable, spy on what you're watching, require unwieldy DRM, take minutes to turn on, interrupt your relaxation time to run "updates", randomly brick themselves, become obsolete in a short several years, and generally dictate your experience based on short-sighted corporate whims? Visiting someone else's house and seeing the garbage behavior they put up with from their "smart TV" is as mindblowing as seeing someone using a web browser without adblock! "Piracy is easier" refers to the experience after you've gone through the work of setting up your own entertainment system. Setting it up certainly does require an investment of time and self-actualization, which for sure is more effort than searching "netflix" and following their "conversion" path. But after that, things just generally work without all of the corporate hassles. I don't foresee everyone choosing to make running a libre media setup one of their hobbies, but most people will know someone who has...
samstave 5y ago
This is why we need an Airport Hub model for media consumption hubs, like Plex. (Which is what Cable TV started out to be: We provide the infrastructure to get the signal into the home. You, the media-company, pays to land your content at our hub so that our subscribers to our infrastructure can see your content. There are lists of how much it would cost to have all the streaming services, and for a LONG time, it was illegal for cable companies to prevent you from selecting the channels you would like a-la-carte... but it did NOT prevent them from charging too much for each channel to make that an unworkable... "You want JUST HBO? Sure, no problem, if you don't buy it in the bundle, the individual channel cost is $29 per month!" --- That is THE failure of "regulation" ; THE GOVERNMENT WILL MANDATE THROUGH LOBBIED REGULATION THAT ONE MUST HAVE THIS [SERVICE] - HOWEVER, WE WILL NOT REGULATE HOW MUCH YU CAN BE CHARGED FOR THE SERVICE, BUT WE WILL FINE AND PUNISH YOU IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THIS SERVICE.
teawrecks 5y ago
You mean the kids who don't buy all those streaming services? Or the grandparents who don't buy all those streaming services? We agree, not having to deal with all these streaming services is easier than having to deal with all these streaming services. But if we're talking about the people who are buying all the streaming services, it's currently easier to pirate. I get that you haven't taken two seconds to do any amount of research on the matter and that complete lack of any experience whatsoever gives you a sense of expertise to call other people blind and absurd, but consider that maybe you just don't know what you're talking about?
- Cipater 5y ago
  Hang on, are you really saying that it's easier for kids and grandparents to set up Plex, Radarr and Sonarr than it is to sign up and use Netflix?
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Well now only a fraction of content is on Netflix so if one compares the time cost of spending 2 hours doing so once this decade vs spending $200 a month for everything from live TV to Disney. The easy option will cost you 24000 over 10 years. If you earn 20 bucks an hour or less like near half of America this represents an additional 1200 labor hours or a full time job for 30 weeks.
    - Cipater 5y ago
      I agree with your comment but you're arguing a different point entirely. You even call Netflix the easy option which is all I'm saying.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Or you could just open Tor browser, search the pirate bay and download stuff with a bittorrent client. That's easy.
- boringg 5y ago
  Yeah but then your tagged by your host country for using Tor.
  - hunter2_ 5y ago
    I've yet to explore Tor. Are you saying there's a reason I shouldn't? I mostly just want to see how my own sites perform, and haven't gotten around to it yet.
  - driverdan 5y ago
    What does that mean? Tagged by your host country?
- BeetleB 5y ago
  I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Most of my friends have no idea what Tor is. Many don't know the Pirate Bay, and most of those who know bittorrent haven't configured it to get past their firewall. But you know what they do know? Turning the TV on, going to Roku, searching for a movie/show, and watching it in whatever app Roku suggests.
kemiller 5y ago
It's not that everyone can or wants to run their own Plex setup, it's that the Plex model, once set up, is much more consumer-friendly: Get the shows you want, don't care about the distributor. It's probably naive to think that would work for a bunch of reasons (Who exactly runs this? Are they a for-profit monopoly now? Who will fund the content if there's no monopoly rent?) but I don't think it's crazy to imagine a service that works more like it. We went to all the effort of unbundling cable and now we just have a different set of bundles. It's a little better, but they've fallen back on old habits.
notadev 5y ago
It’s pretty easy for my family to use Plex just like any other streaming service. The not easy part was my responsibility.
unethical_ban 5y ago
I can agree it isn't easier for those who don't know it. It's like saying the CLI is easier than a GUI - sure, for you. The things this person lists are things I agree with, however. I actually have Amazon Prime Video but still enjoyed watching my friend's pirated copies on Plex, because there is no way to force-disable shitty compression levels, even if I have gigabit Internet. Also, my friend can make sure their video library never changes or goes away, and that certain rarer content is archived forever, not subject to the changes of George Lucas or Disney editing out "problematic" content.
Nav_Panel 5y ago
I have a friend who pays $15 a month for a dedicated seedbox, with 1-click install of a browser-based torrent app + plex. He set up plex to use the remote torrent folder, then anything he downloads gets immediately listed on plex, streamable anywhere, supports chromecast, etc. Pretty cool and a _little_ harder than using a proper paid streaming site, but not a different order of magnitude. Hardest part is finding the seedbox company and also tracking down the right torrent for the show (the choices can be overwhelming).
renewiltord 5y ago
As an amusing anecdote, my parents live thousands of miles from me. The last time I saw them I set up a Raspberry Pi with XBMC (yeah, that long ago) and a flirc IR receiver for a remote, hooked it up with local network, and an external hard drive that has a battery-backed power source. I then `dd`'d over the image onto 5 SD cards and left it with them. Since they're in a low power-security environment, there's a lot of unexpected on-off cycles. Anyway, the whole thing still worked for them until recently and as things started failing (as they inevitably do with this max jank thing I've made them) they just figured out how to work with it. At first, they ran out of content, so they learned how to go get it on ThePirateBay and find the right mirror. Then OpenSubtitles (which was integrated with XBMC) stopped working on it for some reason, so they would go manually get srt files and stick them on the USB drive (visible over Samba from the network). Then as the local external drive started failing, they used the home desktop's samba mounted drive (that I'd set up earlier). Hilariously, the gradual collapse of the system seems to have worked as a natural training regimen, and now they're fully equipped with knowledge. So now they've got one of our old desktops in the living room hooked up to the TV, a small bluetooth keyboard lying on the coffee table, and watch pirate video on the TV. The whole thing is positively comical because I pay for all the services so this isn't necessary at all. But availability is not complete and I'm sure it tickles them to be able to do this stuff themselves. Anyway, thought it was a funny story. They're in their late 60s but they're doctors and last I knew, not particularly tech-savvy, so I am both proud and highly entertained.
seaman1921 5y ago
YES it IS easy. Any kid or grandparent could do it - don't underestimate them. This isn't their nerd-blindness, this is your normie-ignorance.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
> The group of people who are comfortable pirating media and find it "easier" than Netflix is at least an order of magnitude smaller than Netflix's user base. This view is very US-centric. In most of the "rest of the world", netflix either doesn't exist or has a very very limited show list (even here, in a relatively developed EU country), and piracy literally is the only way to get a lot of the very popular shows. And if you already pirate 3 of the 5 shows that you watch, why would you pay for the other 2, that are available on netflix, if you can just pirate those too?
- tomerv 5y ago
  Indeed, pirating is very much an all-or-nothing solution. Torrenting your first movie might be difficult, but the second time it's easy as pie. In many ways, pirating is like any subscription service: signing on is a difficult decision (whether financially or technically), but once you're there and all caught up with the UI, using it again is the default move for watching your next show/movie.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Pirating has got a lot easier in recent years... In my country (slovenia) there is a very good local torrent tracker + a lot of people use the few larger general torrent sites, and even "grandpas" can use them, if their "computer-savy" kid installs them a torrent client, and shows them where to search. In you go further down the balkans, you can find full movies even on youtube, especially local ones (because youtube doesn't remove them). Not that long ago, you could also buy or rent pirated cds/dvds literally from street vendors and "movie clubs" (think blockbuster, but smaller, more local and pirated).
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      hah yeah I've been told by a close Slovene friend countless times how that local tracker you have is soo amazing :P
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  Netflix is US-centric, so that's no surprise: https://www.comparitech.com/tv-streaming/netflix-subscribers/ https://www.comparitech.com/tv-streaming/netflix-subscribers... I don't mean to be rude, but in the grand scheme of things the other countries don't quite matter as much, financially speaking. And those smaller parts of the world pirating isn't a big loss. Similar to the video game industry in Japan; some games may get an overseas following, but if the domestic market is slacking, that studio may not get the chance to make a sequel for those overseas fans. So back to the US-centric sentiment: American audiences don't have the excuse 99% of the time of "this content is region blocked in my country", so the sentiment here shifts to "I don't want to manage 4 streaming services".
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Krasnol 5y ago
Sure it is a magnitude smaller but it was even smaller a few years ago and streaming pages where you don't have to download a movie first are quite common and popular within the non-technical audience and they become even more popular. I'm sure the industry will come up with new ways to intrude on the internet again to stop this before they get together to make another platform which would allow the audience to download everything in one place.

Xelbair 5y ago

yes it is. I come from country where intellectual property was treated as a western joke. Children younger than 10 learned how to pirate - by themselves, without knowing even English. A lot of people still can do that, and it's quite easy to find out how.

fortran77 5y ago

Exactly. I’m a 59 year old man who knows how to pirate, but watches his content from streaming providers because it’s simpler and safer, and I don’t like to steal. I don’t think piracy is what’s killing them. It’s that there are too many streaming providers and people don’t hesitate to drop subscriptions. I tend to subscribe when there’s a deal, watch everything I want to see, then drop it and switch to another one for 6 months. And I’ll bet I’m not alone.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
This. I'm a 60-year-old (Do I win a kewpie doll?), and have the tech chops to pirate, but I don't want to. It's important for me to live a life of Personal Integrity. That stance gets a lot of chuckles with this crowd, but it's of critical importance, in my life. I'm fortunate, in being able to afford streaming services, but find the profusion and variety to be a mess. I like AppleTV Channels, and the way that the AppleTV Watch Now app aggregates the apps. Amazon has something similar, that my wife uses. Unfortunately, it looks like these knuckleheads can't agree on common licensing models. I don't want the "You can have any color you want, as long as it's black." approach of cable bundlers, but I also don't like the myriad ways of subscribing, or, quite frankly, the ever-changing prices. They need to get their shit together.
ghaff 5y ago
I even have Plex set up with (mostly) ripped DVD content but I still subscribe to a few streaming services and buy/rent a la carte now and then. The fragmentation is annoying but subscribing/unsubscribing is pretty low friction. Though I wouldn't be surprised to see more discounting for longer subscription terms. Of course, what was (past tense) also annoying was paying $100/month for a cable bundle that I rarely watched. It's also the case that I have access to a ton of video and don't consider much to be "must see." And to the topic at hand, I may very well cancel Netflix one of these days. There's some stuff I haven't watched yet but after I get through that I may well drop it.

breakfastduck 5y ago

Using a pirate streaming service such as stremio is literally no more difficult than netflix. I think you underestimate how many people pirated things before netflix existed.

yoz-y 5y ago
When it was still called popcorn time I used it. It was easy to use, but it was far from being as reliable as any other commercial streaming service. Buffering was very common and subtitles were missing or would de-sync a lot.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  people forgive a lot of hiccups and quality issues when the service is "free". I see the same sentiment in the emulation scene where people will in one breath call a game "playable" despite weird graphical hitches, slowdowns, and crashes. And in the next breath berate some remaster because it dips under 60 FPS in a few moments of gameplay.
jeffbee 5y ago
Wow, there's a "stremio" button on my TV's remote control? I can't find it. I have a feeling that the definitions of "difficult" and "literally" are unknown to you.
- breakfastduck 5y ago
  I think we have a very different concept of 'difficult'. You seem to treat people as if their baseline is very, very low.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Yes - people don't get that most folks want to watch on the TV without involving any browser.
jasonlotito 5y ago
> Using a pirate streaming service such as stremio is literally no more difficult than Netflix. Nope. Just tried it. Literally not. It gives me the option to play movies, but nope. Can only play trailers. There are addons, but they seem to use Torrent. I have no interest in streaming up to other people and redistributing the data. Is that set up automatically, or does it reuse my internet connection without informing me? Also, with Netflix, I don't have to worry about copyright issues. Does streamio make that as easy? None of this sounds literally as easy. And again, literally cannot play a movie I can easily play on Netflix.

lijogdfljk 5y ago

I think it's true in the same way that Media companies feigned that everyone was pirating. If it's just as fringe as you say, and i agree, then we shouldn't entertain the idea that media is (or was, in early 2000s before Netflix) losing that much money to pirating. As i'm sure now that people start migrating to less legal avenues for digital media we'll start seeing a resurgence of cries over lost profits due to piracy.

sgarland 5y ago

Agreed. While the *arrs are "easy" to set up once you have good knowledge of Kubernetes or at least Docker Compose, that's not exactly common. If you're using the native Windows clients, there's a pretty good chance you don't have a NAS set up (or at least not well), which means there's a decent chance you'll eventually have a hardware failure, and then be surprised when your media is suddenly gone. ZFS pools with full backups, redundant hardware, and highly available servers is not normal.

michaelmrose 5y ago
You can run a media service for example jellyfin on the same PC as the client. Installers are a thing on windows, on Ubuntu you can install software with apt. It wasn't packaged for my distro so I downloaded an archive unzipped and dropped it in /opt Not sure why anyone would absolutely need to understand Kuberetes or even docker. Plugging a PC up to a display has been a better TV for a while now.
brewdad 5y ago
Even just having a spare PC to run your media server is not normal. Never mind all of the technical knowledge needed to keep it all running smoothly.

rhino369 5y ago

It's not easier. I've got a BS in EE and am old enough to have downloaded episodes of the TV show 24 over 56k using early BitTorrent. I've successfully set up plex (which requires an in house server/spare pc), sonarr, radarr, usenet, etc. I'm probably the 99% percentile in ability to pirate. And its not easier than netflix. 90% of people I know probably couldn't set this up. And the other 10% would spend more time dicking around with the set up than they would using netflix or the other services. GabeN is not correct. Piracy is a money problem. Free is very enticing.

bin_bash 5y ago
I didn't understand the GabeN reference but looked it up: > "Piracy is a service problem." Valve's Gabe Newell said that years ago, touting the success of Steam, his online video game distribution service.
- the_other 5y ago
  Am I the only person that hates Steam? The UX is crap; the info architecture is obscure; it doesn't work well on macOS (or at all if I use the wrong file system); it uses confusing labels for the stash of stuff I've already bought. I don't use it often enough to know if my usr/pwd is still valid (it is, fortunately). It had some slightly odd 2FA type thing the last time I logged in. It just gives me the impression that it wants to hide games from me that I've already bought and to make new ones hard to find. I'd rather have discs in boxes taking up space (tbf I also collect vinyl so maybe I'm just anachronistic?) The only good thing going for it is that it doesn't ever email me junk.
  - robonerd 5y ago
    You aren't the only one. Steam is DRM with good PR. Much of the goodwill gamers have for Steam is based on misconceptions, rumors, or delusions, particularly: "If Valve ever goes out of business, they said they'll lift all the DRM for the games I've bought" I've heard that from so many gamers it isn't even funny, it's a widespread misconception and it's obvious horse shit. Maybe Valve has or once had that intention with their own in-house games, but they wouldn't even have the legal right to do something like that for 99.99% of the Steam catalogue. Even for the in-house games, you have to be naive to trust any sort of promise from a commercial software product that isn't in a contract. Notch supposedly once promised that Minecraft would eventually become open source; well that plan evaporated when Microsoft waved a few billion dollars in front of him. Maybe he meant it at the time he said it, but that doesn't count for anything.

dinobones 5y ago

It is extremely tired as well. Any time there is a post about Netflix, or some streaming service, I always predict there will be someone in the comments section talking about their “sweet, open source Unix based media server” and how much better it is.

Krasnol 5y ago
It would make it quite suspicious and weird if the most obvious solution to the problems which are often the content of those posts, wouldn't have been posted by somebody in the comments.

noelsusman 5y ago

It's amazing isn't it? Like people really think streaming services should care about mpv filters as a real use case for their customers. Incredible stuff.

tomc1985 5y ago

The thing that all these everyman-boosters that have invaded and gentrified tech seem to forget is that people are capable of learning, and with the right motivation, they will. Can piracy be the bridge to tech literacy? Sure.

ohyoutravel 5y ago
The comment was: “It's easier just to pirate than keep up with all these streaming services.” Which seems false on its face. Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up. This is unrelated to whether people are capable of learning, but I am even bearish on that when it comes to the average person in the current piracy environment.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  Sucks for them, I guess. Because with the right know-how and some setup it is pretty damn easy.
- mindslight 5y ago
  > Every TV has access to all these streaming services built in. Or Roku devices, which take moments to set up You mean those same TVs and devices that plaster your screen with ads, arbitrarily modify the UI, suddenly make certain shows unavailable, spy on what you're watching, require unwieldy DRM, take minutes to turn on, interrupt your relaxation time to run "updates", randomly brick themselves, become obsolete in a short several years, and generally dictate your experience based on short-sighted corporate whims? Visiting someone else's house and seeing the garbage behavior they put up with from their "smart TV" is as mindblowing as seeing someone using a web browser without adblock! "Piracy is easier" refers to the experience after you've gone through the work of setting up your own entertainment system. Setting it up certainly does require an investment of time and self-actualization, which for sure is more effort than searching "netflix" and following their "conversion" path. But after that, things just generally work without all of the corporate hassles. I don't foresee everyone choosing to make running a libre media setup one of their hobbies, but most people will know someone who has...

samstave 5y ago

This is why we need an Airport Hub model for media consumption hubs, like Plex. (Which is what Cable TV started out to be: We provide the infrastructure to get the signal into the home. You, the media-company, pays to land your content at our hub so that our subscribers to our infrastructure can see your content. There are lists of how much it would cost to have all the streaming services, and for a LONG time, it was illegal for cable companies to prevent you from selecting the channels you would like a-la-carte... but it did NOT prevent them from charging too much for each channel to make that an unworkable... "You want JUST HBO? Sure, no problem, if you don't buy it in the bundle, the individual channel cost is $29 per month!" --- That is THE failure of "regulation" ; THE GOVERNMENT WILL MANDATE THROUGH LOBBIED REGULATION THAT ONE MUST HAVE THIS [SERVICE] - HOWEVER, WE WILL NOT REGULATE HOW MUCH YU CAN BE CHARGED FOR THE SERVICE, BUT WE WILL FINE AND PUNISH YOU IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THIS SERVICE.

teawrecks 5y ago

You mean the kids who don't buy all those streaming services? Or the grandparents who don't buy all those streaming services? We agree, not having to deal with all these streaming services is easier than having to deal with all these streaming services. But if we're talking about the people who are buying all the streaming services, it's currently easier to pirate. I get that you haven't taken two seconds to do any amount of research on the matter and that complete lack of any experience whatsoever gives you a sense of expertise to call other people blind and absurd, but consider that maybe you just don't know what you're talking about?

Cipater 5y ago
Hang on, are you really saying that it's easier for kids and grandparents to set up Plex, Radarr and Sonarr than it is to sign up and use Netflix?
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Well now only a fraction of content is on Netflix so if one compares the time cost of spending 2 hours doing so once this decade vs spending $200 a month for everything from live TV to Disney. The easy option will cost you 24000 over 10 years. If you earn 20 bucks an hour or less like near half of America this represents an additional 1200 labor hours or a full time job for 30 weeks.
  - Cipater 5y ago
    I agree with your comment but you're arguing a different point entirely. You even call Netflix the easy option which is all I'm saying.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

Or you could just open Tor browser, search the pirate bay and download stuff with a bittorrent client. That's easy.

boringg 5y ago
Yeah but then your tagged by your host country for using Tor.
- hunter2_ 5y ago
  I've yet to explore Tor. Are you saying there's a reason I shouldn't? I mostly just want to see how my own sites perform, and haven't gotten around to it yet.
- driverdan 5y ago
  What does that mean? Tagged by your host country?
BeetleB 5y ago
I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Most of my friends have no idea what Tor is. Many don't know the Pirate Bay, and most of those who know bittorrent haven't configured it to get past their firewall. But you know what they do know? Turning the TV on, going to Roku, searching for a movie/show, and watching it in whatever app Roku suggests.

kemiller 5y ago

It's not that everyone can or wants to run their own Plex setup, it's that the Plex model, once set up, is much more consumer-friendly: Get the shows you want, don't care about the distributor. It's probably naive to think that would work for a bunch of reasons (Who exactly runs this? Are they a for-profit monopoly now? Who will fund the content if there's no monopoly rent?) but I don't think it's crazy to imagine a service that works more like it. We went to all the effort of unbundling cable and now we just have a different set of bundles. It's a little better, but they've fallen back on old habits.

notadev 5y ago

It’s pretty easy for my family to use Plex just like any other streaming service. The not easy part was my responsibility.

unethical_ban 5y ago

I can agree it isn't easier for those who don't know it. It's like saying the CLI is easier than a GUI - sure, for you. The things this person lists are things I agree with, however. I actually have Amazon Prime Video but still enjoyed watching my friend's pirated copies on Plex, because there is no way to force-disable shitty compression levels, even if I have gigabit Internet. Also, my friend can make sure their video library never changes or goes away, and that certain rarer content is archived forever, not subject to the changes of George Lucas or Disney editing out "problematic" content.

Nav_Panel 5y ago

I have a friend who pays $15 a month for a dedicated seedbox, with 1-click install of a browser-based torrent app + plex. He set up plex to use the remote torrent folder, then anything he downloads gets immediately listed on plex, streamable anywhere, supports chromecast, etc. Pretty cool and a _little_ harder than using a proper paid streaming site, but not a different order of magnitude. Hardest part is finding the seedbox company and also tracking down the right torrent for the show (the choices can be overwhelming).

renewiltord 5y ago

As an amusing anecdote, my parents live thousands of miles from me. The last time I saw them I set up a Raspberry Pi with XBMC (yeah, that long ago) and a flirc IR receiver for a remote, hooked it up with local network, and an external hard drive that has a battery-backed power source. I then `dd`'d over the image onto 5 SD cards and left it with them. Since they're in a low power-security environment, there's a lot of unexpected on-off cycles. Anyway, the whole thing still worked for them until recently and as things started failing (as they inevitably do with this max jank thing I've made them) they just figured out how to work with it. At first, they ran out of content, so they learned how to go get it on ThePirateBay and find the right mirror. Then OpenSubtitles (which was integrated with XBMC) stopped working on it for some reason, so they would go manually get srt files and stick them on the USB drive (visible over Samba from the network). Then as the local external drive started failing, they used the home desktop's samba mounted drive (that I'd set up earlier). Hilariously, the gradual collapse of the system seems to have worked as a natural training regimen, and now they're fully equipped with knowledge. So now they've got one of our old desktops in the living room hooked up to the TV, a small bluetooth keyboard lying on the coffee table, and watch pirate video on the TV. The whole thing is positively comical because I pay for all the services so this isn't necessary at all. But availability is not complete and I'm sure it tickles them to be able to do this stuff themselves. Anyway, thought it was a funny story. They're in their late 60s but they're doctors and last I knew, not particularly tech-savvy, so I am both proud and highly entertained.

seaman1921 5y ago

YES it IS easy. Any kid or grandparent could do it - don't underestimate them. This isn't their nerd-blindness, this is your normie-ignorance.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

> The group of people who are comfortable pirating media and find it "easier" than Netflix is at least an order of magnitude smaller than Netflix's user base. This view is very US-centric. In most of the "rest of the world", netflix either doesn't exist or has a very very limited show list (even here, in a relatively developed EU country), and piracy literally is the only way to get a lot of the very popular shows. And if you already pirate 3 of the 5 shows that you watch, why would you pay for the other 2, that are available on netflix, if you can just pirate those too?

tomerv 5y ago
Indeed, pirating is very much an all-or-nothing solution. Torrenting your first movie might be difficult, but the second time it's easy as pie. In many ways, pirating is like any subscription service: signing on is a difficult decision (whether financially or technically), but once you're there and all caught up with the UI, using it again is the default move for watching your next show/movie.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Pirating has got a lot easier in recent years... In my country (slovenia) there is a very good local torrent tracker + a lot of people use the few larger general torrent sites, and even "grandpas" can use them, if their "computer-savy" kid installs them a torrent client, and shows them where to search. In you go further down the balkans, you can find full movies even on youtube, especially local ones (because youtube doesn't remove them). Not that long ago, you could also buy or rent pirated cds/dvds literally from street vendors and "movie clubs" (think blockbuster, but smaller, more local and pirated).
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    hah yeah I've been told by a close Slovene friend countless times how that local tracker you have is soo amazing :P
johnnyanmac 5y ago
Netflix is US-centric, so that's no surprise: https://www.comparitech.com/tv-streaming/netflix-subscribers/ https://www.comparitech.com/tv-streaming/netflix-subscribers... I don't mean to be rude, but in the grand scheme of things the other countries don't quite matter as much, financially speaking. And those smaller parts of the world pirating isn't a big loss. Similar to the video game industry in Japan; some games may get an overseas following, but if the domestic market is slacking, that studio may not get the chance to make a sequel for those overseas fans. So back to the US-centric sentiment: American audiences don't have the excuse 99% of the time of "this content is region blocked in my country", so the sentiment here shifts to "I don't want to manage 4 streaming services".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Krasnol 5y ago

Sure it is a magnitude smaller but it was even smaller a few years ago and streaming pages where you don't have to download a movie first are quite common and popular within the non-technical audience and they become even more popular. I'm sure the industry will come up with new ways to intrude on the internet again to stop this before they get together to make another platform which would allow the audience to download everything in one place.